About Me

Tuesday, August 03, 2004

CHICAGO, Aug. 3 — Laws passed by 18 states requiring guns to be safely stored away from children have reduced the rate of teenage suicides, researchers said Tuesday. The child access prevention laws implemented since 1989 may have prevented more than 300 suicides among 14- to 17-year-olds through 2001, according to the study by Daniel Webster of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore.
Suicide is the third-leading cause of death among American teenagers, accounting for 1,883 deaths in 2001.
''There were 63,954 suicides among youth aged 14 through 20 years during the 1976-2001 study period, 39,655 (62 percent) of which were committed with firearms,'' according to the study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Laws that raised the required age of gun buyers and owners, however, did not significantly reduce suicide rates, the study said.

Of 40,000 teenagers that wanted to shoot themselves in 12 years,
300 of them couldn't find the gun. The other 39,700 died. Or is it 20,000 and 19,700?
I don't know, this article is a little fuzzy to me but you can bet your ass that the only thing the NRA will see is that there is no good reason why 12 year olds should not be allowed to buy guns.